A month or two later, after Ziegler sent her play, Robison called to say he was interested.

It just opened for a world premiere at Playhouse's Thompson Shelterhouse on Thursday.

"When I read a new play, I have that feeling almost immediately when it's one I want to produce," says Robison. "I react very viscerally and emotionally to it."

A deal was struck. By last March, it was on the Playhouse calendar for the 2013-14 season, with Michael Evan Haney directing.

"That rarely happens," Ziegler says. "That was pretty lucky."

That mutual friend, by the way? Deborah Zoe Laufer, whose "Leveling Up" premiered at the Playhouse just a year ago.

A playwright with the heart of a poet

Ziegler initially wrote "A Delicate Ship" during a retreat at Cincinnati-native Theresa Rebeck's house in Vermont. It came out of her in "a one-week-kind-of whoosh," she said.

She considered herself a poet until her senior year in college at Yale, when she took a playwriting course. ("I envisioned writing poetry and having some other job.") A professor that year was legendary playwright Arthur Kopit, who suggested she pursue a graduate course in playwriting at NYU.

Ziegler has reached back into her not-so-distant past with "A Delicate Ship," which is – at least in part – inspired by the W.H. Auden poem, "Musee des Beaux Arts":

"The expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky."

This play, she says, is "as much about language and poetry as anything else." It's also a memory play, where in the present, her characters reflect on a night in their past that changed ... well, everything.

At the end of college, Ziegler was at her own crossroads. A job at a literary journal in California or pursuing the life of a playwright in New York?

"I sometimes wonder what my life would have been if I'd taken the other path," says Ziegler, now 34. "We all have those questions."

Giving birth to a new play – and letting it go

Haney and three actors spent a week rehearsing "A Delicate Ship" last fall in Ziegler's New York living room. Ziegler was the mother of a newborn, and says the Playhouse helped her make it work.

"I've been there with two kids of our own," Robison explains.

After the living room rehearsals: more rewrites, then casting in New York. Rehearsals in Cincinnati started in late February. Ziegler arrived in Cincinnati for a third visit last Sunday, in time to watch the preview with an audience. "I feel like this is my last chance to try to tweak it a little bit," she says.

With the team, including actors, reassembled, the reaction was mostly positive. "It did not require a long night at the bar afterward," she says.

By the next morning, Ziegler was working on rewrites based on the conversation the night before. "We're in small change territory, though," she says. She wanted to make sure the play, as created in three dimensions, was conveying all of her intent.

"For the premiere, you want it to be as close to the playwrights' voices as possible," Robison says.

Robison is confident "A Delicate Ship" will make its way onto the schedules of theaters for the 2015-16 season. "It's well written, it's about characters who resonate with most audiences," he says.

For her part, Ziegler sees a certain universality in the characters' experiences. And in the journey a play must take.

"You have to let go of it," she says. "It's the nature of this art form. That's the thrilling and the scary." ¦

Sarah and Sam are enjoying Christmas Eve together when Sarah's old friend Nate knocks on the door, joining them. The one-act play was inspired by the W.H. Auden poem "Musee des Beaux Arts" and Pieter Breughel's painting, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus."